The Champ

Dox Thrash (1893 - 1965) was born in Griffin, Georgia. At age 15, like many other African Americans in the south, he moved north seeking work. After three years working in a circus and in vaudeville, he arrived in Chicago. Thrash studied art first through a correspondence school, then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1914 to 1917. He is most remembered as being a co-inventor of the carborundum print, and his paintings and prints of rural landscapes as well as urban slum life are easily recognizable. He often drew inspiration from his youth in the south, and his work has been shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.